Tag Archives: survival

Hi readers. If you’re like me you’ve been admiring Rokon motorcycles from the 1970s onward, but never got around to purchasing one. Damn it all. Made more sense than any trail bike ever manufactured. Good old American ingenuity.

So what happened? The Rooskies did Rokon one better. Built it out of ceramic frame members instead of steel, made it so light Barbie can lift it over her head and trek up a mountain with it.

Meanwhile Rokon’s just kept glitzing it up, driving the cost up and not really adding anything essential. $795 would buy the first Rokon I ever saw for sale. Today they probably might as well only be sold to the defense industry and celebrities.

Both of these terrorist entities define themselves in terms of rigidly sectarian ideologies. Both are squatting on stolen land. Both brutally trample on the rights of those they consider lesser beings – simply because they hold “second-class” religious views. And both proudly commit horrendous atrocities.

The world’s Jews are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with so-called State of Israel, which purports to represent them without ever having asked their permission. (Israel defines itself as the so-called state of, by and for all Jews, and gives all Jews everywhere the automatic right to Israeli citizenship – while denying citizenship to most non-Jews, including the vast majority of Palestinians, simply because they profess another religion.)

Ex-liberal-Zionist Anthony Lerman, writing in the New York Times, has just written a political obituary entitled “The End of Liberal Zionism.” Like many other Jews, Lerman recognizes that it is becoming impossible for liberal, tolerant, reasonable Jewish people to continue to support the so-called Jewish State of Israel.

Last week Henk Zenoli, a Dutchman who helped save a Jewish boy from Nazis during World War II – and whose father died in a Nazi concentration camp – returned his “Righteous Among Nations” award to Israel. He said the award, given to non-Jews who helped Jews during the holocaust, no longer meant anything given the “murder carried out by the [so-called] State of Israel.”

Zenoli has felt Israel’s murderousness personally. He has lost six relatives– so far – to Zionist butchers during this summer’s Israeli assault on Gaza.

Today, the real holocaust is in Occupied Palestine.

Just as thoughtful Jews and their friends are horrified by the crimes of the so-called State of Israel, the vast majority of Muslims are appalled by the so-called Islamic State. (Unlike Israel, which still enjoys a fair amount of Jewish support, Islamic State has virtually no support from any of the world’s established Muslim nations, scholars, or religious organizations.)

Ironically, while Jews are turning against the so-called Jewish State, and Muslims denounce Islamic State, the two terrorist entities seem to be working together. According to some reports, hundreds of ISIL terrorists have been treated in Israeli hospitals. And while the so-called Jewish State of Israel supports Islamic State’s attempts to overthrow the government of Syria, Islamic State for its part opposes resistance against Zionism while instead working to destabilize Israel’s enemies.

Since the self-styled Jewish State and Islamic State have so much in common – including sectarianism, atrocities, destabilization of neighbors, and squatting on stolen land – and share the same enemies (reasonable Jews and Muslims, and reasonable people in general) – perhaps they should merge into a single entity: ISrael. Netanyahu and al-Baghdadi could serve as co-caliphs, just as Rome sometimes had two emperors.

ISrael would be a paradise for people who like to shoot children and cut off heads. It would be a wonderful place to be a fanatically intolerant bigot loathing lesser beings who profess religious incorrectness.

In ISrael, self-styled chosen people who despise outsiders as cattle would rub shoulders with fanatics who see everyone but themselves as heretics worthy of death. The two groups would get along famously. al-Baghdadi would feel perfectly at home in an Israeli settlement, where he could occasionally venture outside the barbed wire with his rifle to shoot “heretics,” wreck their homes and uproot their olive trees. He might even be able to talk the Zionist settlers into beheading their Palestinian victims rather than just shooting or beating them to death.

While the Zionists of the so-called Jewish State and the Takfiris of Islamic State work together to make Jews and Muslims look like barbarians and war criminals, reasonable Jews and Muslims – along with well-wishers from other religions – need to work together to put an end to such nonsense.

They need not reject the notion of religious governance. If Jews wish to live according to Jewish law, and Muslims according to Islamic law, they should be allowed, indeed encouraged, to do so.

In Islamic Spain, the Ottoman Empire, and other classical Islamic societies, each religious group would organize itself according to its own laws and control its own affairs. Muslims did not force Christians and Jews to follow Muslim rules while the Christians and Jews did not impose their laws and lifestyles on Muslims.

But modern states have a totalitarian outlook. They try to force everyone to live the same way and follow the same rules. That is why modern states, be they a so-called Jewish State like Israel, an Islamic State like al-Baghdadi’s, fascist or communist states like Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR, or even so-called liberal democratic states like Europe and the USA, have not yet learned to grant their citizens the level of pluralistic autonomy enjoyed by the religious communities of medieval Andalusia.

Fanatical, intolerant, sectarian, human-rights-abusing “religious” regimes like Netanyahu’s and al-Baghdadi’s are simply extreme examples of the totalitarianism at the root of the modern nation state. So reasonable Jews and Muslims must abjure the siren song of monolithic secularism, even as they reject the defamation of their religions by the vicious extremists of the “Jewish” and “Islamic” states.

I finally just said, “To hell with it.” Ordered something called Oxygen Boost in a can. 60 deep breaths per can. Even though it doesn’t make a lot of sense, the oxygen-concentrating machine I used when I stayed at Eddie Brewer’s place last year seemed to help a lot. Several times when I was in the midst of seemingly major events it brought them to an immediate halt.

The past few days around here, maybe because of the Orange Ozone Alert, have me thinking it’s time to give O2 another try, despite the fact the various sawbones haven’t seen fit to prescribe it. I haven’t been able to exercise for several days, which they did prescribe.

Anyway, if these 60 breath cans of 02 get the job done I’ll be back banging on the door of the VA over in KC Missouri threatening to scream and hold my breath if they can’t bring themselves to prescribe something to fill in during those moments when Mother Earth just isn’t enough.

After all, is it not written, “You veterans are responsible for keeping us free! You brave guys deserve the absolute best for killing all those brown people who wanted to take away our freedoms! And while a lot of people can breathe easier because of all the freedoms you protected, if you breathe hard we can afford a bit of oxygen to help you along?” Ahem. You believe the bullshit comes out of the mouths of patriots?

Well, I’m truly moved, though I din’t kill any brown people who were trying to take away our freedom. Got into a few fights with some in bars but nobody got hurt too badly. Bastards trying to steal our freedoms.

And I’d breathe more easily if someone over at the VA fixed me up with the freedom to breath when the going gets tough.

Is it not written, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going?”

I ain’t going anywhere without being able to, including all the usual mobility abilities.

A nun, a lesbian, a grandmother or three, artist, birdwatcher, farm girl. They talk about life, death, love, fear, war and death again as they struggle to catch fish, frogs, find sustenance in the wilderness long enough to survive.

*****, Five Stars is how I rate this movie, how tickled I am to have overcome my male prejudices against chick flicks and watched it.

The arrow indicates the crowd pleaser point of interest. “I can’t believe it ain’t cancer!’ Chorus of GI specialists declares. “Go back in and biopsy that SOB again!”. It ain’t all because I’m a white guy. White guys, it turns out, are one hell of a lot more prone to cancer of the goozle than non-white guys. And nobody likes to see anyone win in lotteries of this nature. It makes everyone look bad.

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

I just this morning had my third endoscopy in two months. Not to mention various CAT Scans, etc, and one of those big things involving a donut and a magnet on a rolling human-scale tray. Jeanne tells me it’s the MRI, which I can’t have anymore because of my electric cow-prod defibrillator.

This week I had a manometry, gastric emptying tests, and fights with the VA hospital concerning whether I ought to be letting them do nothing instead of going to the private physicians and them doing stuff.

In fact I’m bankrupting Medicare with my heartfelt cardiac flaws and my Disneyland esophagus darling of gastroenterologists and Asian male physicians. They do the snake swallowing a camera routine, take pics and biopsy it. Look at the pics and say, “Ohshitohdear!”

Well, the nice Asian GI specialist today came after I regained my cogitude to give me a puzzled frown and tell me it ain’t cancer again this time. But it’s inflamed as hell, got a grotesque growth about it, and has every right to rear up on its hind legs and be what it damned well wants to be. Thinks they’d better have another look at it as soon as they can forget it ain’t.

What I haven’t confided to them is the part about Caisse’s herbal tea. Black burdock, turkey rhubarb, sheep sorrel and slippery elm all boiled together half an hour in stainless steel, left 12 hours, boiled again, strained, and taken in increments of an ounce morning, another nights.

I call it making my own luck. I’m not evangelical about it, but if anyone ever tells you you’ve got terminal cancer and you might as well go home and tell the heirs who’s getting what, consider remembering it. Black burdock, turkey rhubarb, sheep sorrel and slippery elm.

Welcome

I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.